


Common Ground

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Awkward Pillow Talk, Drugs, Dubious Consent, M/M, Mutually Dubious Consent, Post-Episode: s02e08: Hostage, Sex Pollen, Sexual Content, The Descent-style cave monsters, Trapped, Trapped In A Closet, Violence, forced to work together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:54:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26508547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: Travis’s lip curled in contempt. “A truce?”“Unless you have any better ideas.”“I’ve got plenty of ideas.”“Preferably ones that won’t end with both of us dead,” Blake said.Few things could make being trapped in an abandoned underground laboratory with your archenemy more bearable, but it's fair to say the cave monsters definitely don't help. The sex pollen, on the other hand...
Relationships: Roj Blake/Travis
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11
Collections: Iddy Iddy Bang Bang! 2020





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Iddy Iddy Bang Bang. Sex pollen, enemies being forced to work together, and being trapped in a cave with thousands of monsters: it's basically the purest distillation of my id possible, and it was a shitload of fun to write.

Prologue

Even soaked to the skin and shivering, his chest aching with every ragged gasp for air, Blake can’t quite believe they’re really free. He can see a thin sliver of the yellow-tinted sky through the canopy of the trees above the stream, but it seems as illusory as an image projected onto a fragile glass screen.

Any moment now that screen will shatter, and they’ll find themselves back down in the darkness, trapped once more in the false shelter of the laboratory complex, choking down poison because they have no choice. Or the crevice in the rock face they’ve just crawled out of will split open, grow into a yawning chasm, and swallow them both up.

It’s just the spores in his system. Some disassociative effect that will take a while to clear. Just like the part of him that’s currently clawing its way up into his chest, clamouring that it wants to be back there.

He can almost understand why. Things were simpler in a way. Strange how he feels the claustrophobia more out here now that he’s free, with the walls slamming back into place in his mind.

 _It wasn’t real_ , he thinks.

But it felt real.

Travis rises to his knees, splashing in the water. He’s lost the eye patch, Blake registers numbly. Probably ripped away by a rock, since that side of his face is badly scraped, the skin smeared pink with diluted blood. Blake fixes on the blank staring whiteness of the bionic eye, the whorl of scars that wind around the socket. Travis’s expression is strange, a mixture of determination and wild desperation and if Blake wasn’t so wrung out it might have served as a warning. Travis has lost all control over his left arm now, but he’s still strong enough to grip Blake’s leg and simultaneously pull him down while dragging himself upwards. They’ve both of them been pushed to their limits, but it is Travis who has been trained to function beyond the realms of normal human endurance, and Blake isn’t prepared for this.

Although really he should have been. He should have known the truce wouldn’t last, that the moment they were free it would be over.

Travis punches him.

It hurts less than it should: Blake’s sense of pain is dimmed, but he tastes every iron-rich drop of the blood that floods his mouth from his split lip.

He hits out himself with a weak flail of his fist. It catches Travis in his chest, not hard, but enough to wind him, and when Travis tries to punch him again, Blake catches his fist in both hands. Arms aching, he twists, and rolls out from underneath, trying to scramble away. He’s moving too slowly, his joints locking up from the cold, his muscles aching from the abuses they’ve been put through.

Travis seizes his hair and drags him back. He wraps his arm around Blake’s throat, and pins him down. He’s shivering just as violently as Blake is, his teeth chattering, and there’s a horrible intimacy about the position, about the way Travis is stretched along the length of Blake’s body.

An image flashes through Blake’s mind: scars and gritted teeth and neither one of them wanting to cede to the other. This isn’t so different, really, from what happened below ground.

He claws at the arm around his throat. “Travis, wait. We aren’t safe yet–”

Travis’s breath comes fast and shallow as he shakes his head. “It has to be now.”

“No, it doesn’t. We can–”

Travis’s grip tightens. He presses his cheek against Blake’s, brushes his hand over his throat, before almost tenderly tightening its grip. “It has to be now, Blake.”

“ _Why_ , for god’s sake?”

“Because,” Travis says, his voice faintly disbelieving, “I’ve almost forgotten why I hate you.”

And then his weight presses inexorably against Blake’s back, and Travis forces his face beneath the surface of the water.

1

He woke to the dripping of water on his face. Blake jerked back into consciousness, gasping, and for a moment he didn’t have a clue where he was. Another drip of water on his cheek, and he twisted away, swiping at the wetness on his face, then flinched. There was a stabbing insistent pain at the base of his skull.

When he sat up, he had to breathe through a flood of dizziness and pain that made his vision bleed dark at the edges and his blood rise to a roar in his ears. He waited until it had eased off, then gingerly brought his fingers to the back of his head and winced as a needle of pain speared his skull. His curls were matted with congealing blood.

Little more than a light concussion, he hoped. At least it had stopped bleeding.

Above him the rocky walls of the crevasse rose up, silvered by the moonlight flooding through far overhead.

For a moment he couldn’t remember where he was or what he was doing here, then it all flooded back in. They’d come to Endymion in response to a distress message from the leader of a rebel group, only to find it was another trap, and Travis had got there first. Clearly, he’d managed to come to an arrangement of some kind with Servalan since he hadn’t been dragged back to Space Command to face his execution.

Not good news. Then again, none of this was good news.

Blake had a distant memory of running through the forest, then the ground giving away beneath him without warning, but it had been daylight then. If night had fallen, then that meant he’d had to have been unconscious for a couple of hours at least. Biting his lip in concern, he raised the transporter bracelet to his mouth and depressed the button.

“It’s Blake. I’m all right. Transport, please.” Silence. “Cally? Avon? _Anybody_?” He waited, chewing at the inside of his cheek. The silence stretched out, and after it was clear no one was going to reply, he ran his thumb over the bracelet’s casing, searching for damage. It might have broken in the fall, or perhaps the dense rock was interfering with the signal somehow.

_Or nobody’s listening._

He grimaced. About all he could hope for was that Avon and Vila had safely returned to the Liberator and that they were safe from Travis and his ship. If they’d left out of necessity, all he could do was trust in them and hope that when they were able to they would come back for him, and wouldn’t simply assume he was dead.

First things first…

He pushed himself to his feet, clenching his jaw until the waves of pain and dizziness eased as much as they were ever likely to. A headache was setting in, creeping up from the base of his skull to claim prime position behind his eyes.

The rock around him was littered with fallen rocks, vines and other foliage, evidence of his fall. He must have grabbed at anything and everything in a desperate attempt to stop himself falling when the ground gave way beneath him. One of the sinkholes Zen warned them about. The vines hadn’t been enough to stop him falling, but it seemed they had at least slowed him down enough that the fall didn’t kill him outright. And now that his memories were coming back, he could dimly remember that Travis had been about to fire just before the ground gave way. It might very well have saved his life.

With any luck, it wouldn’t go on to kill him further down the line.

He looked around, peering into the darkness of the tunnels, then back up. The walls of the chasm were smooth and dark as knapped flint, with only a few places where vines and roots might offer convenient handholds. It wouldn’t be an easy climb, and the rock would be slippery from the pelting rain that stung his upturned face. Blake shivered. He’d dressed for the daylight hours, and had been lying on damp rock for hours; the chill had crept into his bones.

Then he caught himself and smiled. He was starting to sound like Vila.

Rolling his shoulders, he cast his gaze up the rock face, searching for handholds. He was just telling himself he could do it, when a sound came drifting through the tunnels, a faint whistling shriek. He froze for a moment, his heart picking up its pace as he waited for the sound to come again, then he set his foot into the first of the toeholds he could find and boosted himself up, clinging onto the slippery rock.

He got perhaps four yards before his grip slipped and he fell, sprawling on the rock. He scrambled up, refusing to accept defeat, ignoring the ache in his fingers and arm muscles as his feet scrabbled at the sides of the well and he hauled himself up again. 

The rain was heavier now, plastering his hair in slick curls against his forehead and running down into his eyes and half-blinding him. Partway up, he was forced to stop and wipe his face against his forearm. When he glanced up, the patch of sky seemed no closer than it had been before he started.

“Come on,” he muttered. “You can do this. Come _on_.”

Feeling for another foothold, he found a crevice barely large enough to wedge the toe of his boot into. His fingers threatened to cramp up as he reached for a scraggy shrub twining out from a gap in the rocks. It gave a little at his tugging, but it seemed like it would hold. Clinging to it, he wriggled into position and curled his other arm around the shrub to brace himself while he brought the teleport bracelet close to his mouth. Again, there was no answer. Just dead space.

Just too deep, that was all. He needed to get higher up. Ideally, out of the chasm altogether. He’d reassess then.

Another couple of breaths. Blinking to get the rainwater out of his eyes, searching for the next handhold. He’d need to move soon; his arm muscles were threatening to cramp up. He shifted his grip on the branch, eyeing the rock in search of the easiest route.

As he reached for the next handhold, a tiny crevice just out of comfortable reach, his foot slipped. Reflexively, he clamped his grip tight around the shrub. His knee slammed painfully into the rock.

With a faint silken ripping sound and the smell of wet earth, the shrub began to give.

Half-blinded by the rain, he scrabbled for purchase, but found nothing but smooth slippery rock. Then the roots tore free, filling the air with the iron-rich scent of wet earth, and he was falling yet again.

This time he hit the ground hard enough to stun him, and when he finally came to, it was to the sound of something else moving in the darkness.

Still dazed from the fall, he held himself still. He could see something partway up the side of the sinkhole, a pallid form pressed close against the rock.

His mouth dry, Blake reached to the gun at his belt and found the holster empty. The wire had been shorn through. No sign of the weapon itself.

At Blake’s movement, the creature flitted swiftly from one side of the well to the other. Then it dropped silently to the ground, landing with a faint crunch on the rocks and was swallowed up by the darkness.

He’d been holding his breath. Forcing himself to breathe, he recalled what he’d learned from Zen: a series of long-abandoned underground laboratories, a cave system inhabited by medium-sized creatures of indeterminate intelligence. He hadn’t paid it much mind at the time, since it hadn’t seemed relevant. It bloody well seemed relevant now.

He heard a faintly birdlike chirping sound, reducing in volume as it moved away. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see it now, just about, a vaguely humanoid figure, scrawny and hunched, with waxy white skin that spoke of countless generations of evolution underground.

Carefully, moving so slowly his already battered muscles ached, he inched to the wall and used it to pull himself up.

The creature’s head snapped around.

Blake froze. It seemed to be staring directly at him, but showed no sign of having seen him. Its eye sockets were shrunken and puckered, its eyes like flat black stones reflecting no light.

Blind? He hoped so.

He flattened himself against the rock as it came scampering towards him, its breathing wet and phlegmy. It reeked, a sour ammonia stench that turned his stomach, and he shuddered as it passed him so close it almost brushed against him.

Suddenly it went still and settled into a poise of such intensity it could only be hunting, its only movements minute twitches of its head and ears. A shiver rippled over its flanks, ropy muscles bunching beneath the fishbelly-white leathery skin, and its face changed, the wormy black lips wrinkling back to reveal a worrying number of needle-sharp teeth.

It moved without warning, so fast that Blake was almost startled into making a noise. It sprang up onto an outcropping near his head, a spur on one of its elongated feet scraping against his cheek. Then it was gone.

Hardly daring to exhale, Blake pressed his hands flat against the rock, waiting. After it didn’t come back, he dropped slowly into a crouch, his kneecaps aching with the strain of the controlled movement. He picked up a rock, hefted it for a moment in his fist, before he straightened up again. There was a little comfort to be drawn from the fact that he was armed, but not much. Not nearly enough. At least it was smaller than he was.

After a few more moments of waiting, he started down the tunnel, moving in the opposite direction to the creature, setting his left hand to the wall, an old trick his uncle had taught him when he was a boy: how to find your way out of a labyrinth. His progress was faltering, his steps slow and careful, as silent as he could make them. Easier than he’d expected though; the floor of the tunnel was oddly smooth and even, the walls too, almost as if–

Unexpectedly, there was light. It flickered on with a crackle, plunging him into the sort of low-level illumination that came of an emergency power back-up system. The light came from a panel that had been set into the wall, and when he made no other movement it flickered out, plunging him back into darkness again.

So. A tunnel that was at least partially man-made. Well, that struck him as good news at least, even if whatever facilities down here had been abandoned.

A sound came from behind him. Not the creature, which had moved with almost silent grace, but the sound of human footsteps.

Keeping close to the wall, he slipped back the way he came. Where the man-made tunnel opened out onto the sink hole, he pressed himself into a niche and peered out, waiting. At the edge of his hearing, Blake heard a distant chittering sound, which, if he hadn’t seen the creature he might have assumed was bats. After a few minutes, a dark figure emerged from the shadow. Human. Male. Too much to hope it was Avon or Vila come searching for him. And even so he couldn’t help hoping exactly that, until the man reached the edge of the pool of light filtering down from above, and Blake’s fears were grimly confirmed.

Travis.

Silently, inwardly, Blake cursed.

Travis stopped at the spot where Blake had fallen, kicking over the debris with his boot. He looked up, shielding his eyes from the rain, then dropped his gaze to the ground again and squatted down to touch something on the ground. Blood, most probably, judging by the way he brushed his fingers together with a grim smile.

The chittering sound came again, louder now. Closer. Blake sensed rather than heard something shift overhead. One of the creatures, leaping from rock to rock, agile as a monkey and moving in eerie silence, He hesitated, hefting the rock in his hand as he considered his options, then he crouched again, snatched up a smaller stone instead, and sent it skittering down the tunnel. Travis’s head snapped up. Deep in the shadows behind him, Blake saw movement, a flash of pallid flesh, there for an instant then gone.

“I know you’re here, Blake.” Travis advanced, slowly, but there was something off about the way he was holding himself, and he hadn’t raised his artificial arm in preparation to fire his lazeron gun. From the way it hung at his side, Blake guessed Travis had damaged it in a fall of his own, but he still seemed to have retained some movement in it, and he carried a branch in his right hand, wielding it like a club. More flashes of movement in the darkness behind him, and the calls of the creatures came again, louder now. Travis barely glanced around now, too intent on hunting Blake, his remaining eye narrowed as he scanned the tunnel ahead, flexing his grip around the makeshift club. “I can hear you breathing.”

Blake flattened himself into his niche. Saw, in the shadows, one of the creatures crouched on an outcrop the rock, its head tilting towards them as it searched by sound.

He moved without conscious thought, As Travis passed him, Blake emerged from the niche, clapped his hand over Travis’s mouth and hauled him back against the wall, hissing, “Shut up,” in Travis’s ear. Travis reacted at once, moving to drive his elbow back into Blake’s gut, when one of the creatures landed on the ground nearby in a crouch. Travis flinched, freezing up. Blake jerked him as if to say, _See?_

It knew they were there, even if it couldn’t see them. Its ears had pricked up, its head swivelling as it chattered at the air. Searching. Travis had gone rigid, but Blake should have known he wouldn’t stop fighting for long. After a moment’s hesitation, he was already raising the branch, readying himself to strike.

Blake nudged him, indicating, when Travis jerked his head around, his eye glittering with contempt, the other creatures massing in the tunnel. Travis stiffened again. Blake could hear the scrape of his grinding teeth.

Without warning, the creature reared up on its hind legs so that it towered a foot over them, its wings snapping open with a sound like the crack of a whip. It shrilled, a screech that pierced Blake’s eardrums, drilling deep into his skull. He squeezed his eyes closed, jaw clenched, fighting the urge to scream at the pain, and then to gasp when the sound finally died away, and the creature paused, waiting. His hand, he realised, was still pressed over Travis’s mouth.

The creature gave a final questioning trill and then it dropped back into its crouch and loped away back the way it had come.

They both eased off.

Travis irritably wrenched his face away, and Blake let out the breath he’d been holding, and slumped back against the rock. And as he did so, the holster at his belt scraped audibly against the rock.

Near his head, something hissed. Blake looked up. One of the creatures had come silently creeping down the side of the rock. Its face was less than a foot from his own.

He shoved Travis away, yelling to run. The first creature whipped around with a series of clicking sounds that he could feel against his face. Travis lashed out at it with his makeshift club, and then that club was torn from his grasp, Blake was already running, hurtling through the darkness, blind until the motion-activated lights kicked in, guiding the way. When Travis bellowed in rage and fury behind him, he spun. One of the creatures had landed on Travis’s back, slashing at him. He slammed back against the rock to dislodge it, and then he was running, elbowing past Blake, whose attention had fixed on the deep shadows that pooled beyond the weak emergency lighting. The darkness was alive and swarming. Dozens of them from the sound of it, perhaps hundreds.

He ran, picking up speed to a sprint as he gained on Travis, turned a corner and the tunnel opened out into a cavern dominated by the metal wall of a man-made building. Travis slammed into the metal by the door, fumbled at the handle, and crashed through when it opened. He spun, looking back, his eye not on Blake, but on whatever the hell was behind Blake.

He was already trying to get the door shut when Blake flung himself shoulder-first through it. Unable to halt his momentum, he skidded, his hip slamming into a table.

Travis swore at him then flung himself against the door again as a weight slammed against it from the other side. In the instant before Blake joined him, he saw the cavern beyond was a seething mass of white.

A face pressed up against the plexiglass window. The door lurched inwards. An arm lashed through the gap, clawing at Blake and grabbing a handful of his hair. It yanked hard enough to bring tears to his eyes, claws scrabbling against his scalp. He jerked himself free, and smacked the rock into the grasping arm repeatedly until it retreated, snaking back through the gap.

The door slammed shut, the latch clicking into place. Claws scrabbled against the metal, the shrieks of thwarted rage muffled.

Panting, Blake recovered, Travis was breathing hard too, his forehead pressed against the metal. They both flinched as something crashed against the door from the other side, so hard the metal door shook. There was a series of clicks and whistles, then silence. A long pause. They waited, moving only to bring the emergency lighting back up when it flickered out.

Finally, Blake rose up, peering through the glass. Beyond he could see nothing but darkness. “I think they’ve gone,” he said, strongly suspecting it wasn’t true. If it was, he doubted they’d have gone too far.

Travis stirred. He turned his head to look at Blake, his single eye glittering with hatred.

Blake raised the rock. “Don’t move.”

“What are you going to do, Blake? Bash my skull in? You don’t have the stomach for that.”

“I wouldn’t underestimate me.”

“Oh, I don’t,” Travis said softly. “Believe me, I don’t.”

“Listen to me. There are dozens of those things out there. If we work together, at least until we’re out of these caves, we might actually have a chance.”

Travis’s lip curled in contempt. “A truce?”

“Unless you have any better ideas.”

“I’ve got plenty of ideas.”

“Preferably ones that won’t end with both of us dead,” Blake said, and Travis’s mouth flattened into a hard line. “No, I thought not. We need to get this door barricaded.” Carefully, he stepped away from the door, casting his gaze around until it landed on a metal-framed table that didn’t appear to have been welded to the floor. “Here, help me with this.”

“I’m not your follower.”

“That door isn’t locked,” he said wearily. “And without power to the facility we have no way to lock it. If we don’t barricade it off somehow, they can get inside as easily as we could.”

“They’re animals. They don’t know how to open doors.”

“You’re quite certain of that, are you?”

“As certain as you are that there are none inside already.”

Blake gestured to the other end of the table. “Then _help_ me.”

Travis glared at him, muscle in his jaw clenching, then he stalked forwards to the other end of the table and gripped it with his working arm. Just for a moment he seemed to waver, leaning against the table as though he were about to faint, but he recovered so quickly Blake wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it. “Ready?”

“Are you all right? How’s the wound?”

Travis shot him a look of loathing. “It’s superficial, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear that. I’ll survive.”

“That’s yet another thing we can’t be certain of,” Blake said, taking just a little pleasure in twisting the knife and watching Travis’s expression darken. “Ready?”

Travis’s expression was strained, but he lifted the table without complaint. Together they manhandled it across to the door and set it on its side. After some experimentation, they managed to wedge a chair beneath the handle, and block the whole lot off with another table to stop the chairs from being dislodged. They stood back, examining their handiwork.

To Blake’s mind, it all looked horribly flimsy, but the door was half a foot of solid metal, and unlocked or not, if the handle couldn’t be turned, they wouldn’t be coming through this way.

He glanced at Travis, who had leant against a table, and was gripping his upper arm and sweating, features drawn and pinched.

“I’m going to look around,” Blake said, and Travis’s gaze snapped towards him. “You stay here and keep watch.”

“Do you take me for a fool? I’m coming with you.”

“Travis...”

He stood, and even in pain he had a predatory grace. Something primal twisted in the back of Blake’s mind, an old and inaccessible memory, dug deep like a splinter he couldn’t quite work free. “We have a truce, remember?” Travis said. “Or don’t you trust me to watch your back?”

How it made him wish he had Avon here instead, someone he could trust implicitly. At least when it came to doing what was in his own best interests, anyway.

“You’re more predictable than you realise, Travis.”

“Am I?”

“In a way. You see, I don’t think you want to die. Not here and not like this. Don’t you want to deliver me over to the Supreme Commander yourself, all the accolades you’ll receive, perhaps even a pardon?” By the expression on Travis’s face, he didn’t think a pardon was likely to be forthcoming.

Travis held out his hand. “If you’re so willing to trust me, Blake, give me the rock.”

“Not a chance.”

* * *

The long-abandoned facility had an air of disuse and abandonment so intense it seemed like every surface ought to have been shrouded in dust. Stretches of corridor were sectioned off with sliding doors that they had to lever open with some difficulty, and not all of the lights worked, leaving some areas in almost total darkness. The western end had been given over entirely to laboratories, spotlessly clean, the electronics long dead. At the southern end, they found a lift, but the doors were sealed shut and refused to budge no matter what they did.

Blake made sure to keep Travis in his eyeline, in case he wasn’t quite as dedicated to the concept of a truce as Blake hoped. But then, Blake was starting to have second thoughts himself, and not just because he kept imagining how Avon would react.

There was something about the silence and the echoing corridors that set his nerves on edge. Their boots rang out on the metal flooring no matter how quietly they tried to move, and while the air might have been clean, it was also stale, and Blake couldn’t shake his growing dread that something terrible had happened here. That, and the dim light was making his headache worse.

Some rooms remained untouched and pristine, but others were in chaos as though a struggle had taken place, the floor littered with broken glass. Occasionally near vents, he’d catch the lingering smell of smoke, and as they approached the part of the facility which seemed to be set aside for everyday life, the acrid smell of charred metal intensified, and the lights grew less reliable, flickering on and off, constantly threatening to leave them stranded in the pitch black. If they died completely...

He pushed open the door to the medbay, levering it with his knee, ready with the rock, while ahead of him Travis paused in the open doorway that led to the refectory.

“Blake?”

“Hold on.” The medbay was empty. He stepped inside and let the door slide shut behind him, relieved to be cut off momentarily from Travis, even if he’d showed no signs of violence as yet aside from the occasional glare. The medical supplies cupboard was locked, but from the looks of it it was almost fully stocked and there were first aid materials close to hand. He picked up a kit, and set it on the desk while he rifled through the desk drawers.

Metal squealed on metal as Travis levered the door open.

“You need to see this.” His voice was filled with a level of menace that made the back of Blake’s neck prickle with unease.

“What is it?”

“The mess hall.”

“Signs of life?”

“Let’s hope not.”

Frowning, Blake picked up the first aid kit and shoved it into Travis’s arms as he stepped out into the corridor. The door to the mess hall had been wedged open, and it was from here that the smell of smoke originated. Fearing a trap, he stopped in the doorway, casting his gaze over the chaos beyond. There’d been a fire or an explosion in here at some point, a brief surge of extreme heat twisting the scattered chairs and tables into surreal shapes by extreme heat. At the far end – what must have been the outer wall of the facility – there was a gaping hole in the wall that stretched from floor to ceiling, its edges ragged twists of tortured metal. Some kind of fungal growth twined in through the gap, threading across the metal grating of the floor.

Slowly, he moved towards the gap in the wall, wincing at the sound of broken glass crunching beneath his feet. He tried to avoid the fungal growths, but there was too much of it and it compressed beneath his feet. Beyond the hole, there was nothing but darkness and a deep well of shadows, and he felt a sickening vertiginous sensation in his gut. When the lights in the corridor blinked off, Travis deliberately didn’t move to bring them on again. Blake could still just about see, though – the threads of fungus shimmered with an eerie greenish bioluminescence.

“What happened here?”

“A strontium grenade,” Travis said, his voice far closer than Blake was expecting. He quickly turned, stepping back from the hole, aware the edges were viciously jagged, sharp enough to rip flesh to sheds. “The fools. It tore right through the wall.” He eyed Blake grimly. “We can assume this place isn’t secure.”

Blake nodded, thinking, _Damn_.


	2. Chapter Two

They took stock of their supplies, what little they’d managed to gather from this floor of the facility, which wasn’t much: the first aid equipment, and a box of phosphorescent flares which glowed for a couple of hours with a fizzing harsh white light that was at least a respite from the constant gloom, and might come in useful if the emergency lighting malfunctioned. The fresh and frozen food had long since rotted away to nothing in the years since the facility had been abandoned, but there was a store of dried field rations, still as edible as field rations ever were.

There was running water too, but while it had seemed clear from the tap, when he filled a glass and picked it up for a closer look, glittering particles of the same bioluminescent light shimmered into light, a galaxy swirling in the glass. His stomach turned and he tipped the lot down the sink. The filters must have been contaminated by the same fungal growth that was gradually taking over the mess hall. The emergency supplies had included a stock of water purifying tablets, but with any luck they wouldn’t have to risk it. Then again, he had a feeling luck would prove to be in short supply.

In the rec room, he snapped the inner casing of a flare open, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the light, and spread a copy of the plans of the facility out on a table. While he studied them, Travis shrugged off his uniform jacket, peeling the shredded leather away from his bloodied shoulder with an occasional stifled hiss of pain.

Blake rubbed his jaw. “Hmm.”

“What is it?”

“Well, it looks like the lift shaft runs the entire height of the facility, and all the way up to the surface. Now, the lift won’t be running because there’s no power, but if we can get access to the shaft we might be able to escape that way.”

“Those doors are sealed. We won’t just be able to lever them open.”

“There has to be a way through, I’m sure of it. If the lift is another level, those doors might not be sealed. Or we might be able to rip our way through them.”

“With what?”

“You mentioned grenades.”

“If I’d had one on me, I would have used it by now. I’m sure you would have too.”

Blake hesitated. “The facility has a weapons locker.”

Travis went still, his face sharpening. “Show me,” he demanded.

Reluctantly, Blake set his finger on the plans, pointing to the spot. Travis leaned against the table, standing too close for comfort. His undershirt was damp with fresh sweat, and revealed the ridged scars on his left shoulder where the prosthetic arm had been joined to his flesh. Blake averted his gaze.

“That’s on a different level,” Travis said.

“Two floors down.”

Travis swore under his breath, frowning at the plans. “Even without the lift there might be a way to get down there.”

“Yes, I know,” Blake said, with only a trace of reluctance. “I thought of that too. The air ducts. It’ll be a tight squeeze, but it’s a possibility, if you’re really that desperate to get your hands on a weapon.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Yes, but who do you intend to use it on, Travis? Me, or the creatures?”

“Maybe I haven’t made up my mind yet.” His voice sounded slightly slurred, and Blake took a closer look at him. His hair was in disarray, falling around his forehead, but underneath his brow was beaded with sweat.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right.”

“You don’t look it. Let me see your back.” As Blake started towards him Travis wrenched away with a snarl. “Don’t be stupid,” Blake snapped. “Sit down and let me take a look at you.”

For a moment, Travis seemed like he was going to argue, then sullenly he straddled a chair, folding his arms on the backrest. Blake stepped closer, grimacing at the wound. It was shallow enough, three parallel gashes which had already stopped bleeding, but the skin around them looked swollen. “It looks nasty.”

“It’s fine.”

“I think we need to get it clean. Take your shirt off.”

“No.”

“For _god’s sake_ , Travis. Stop arguing with me. Believe it or not, I am trying to help you, although I’m beginning to wonder why I’m bothering.”

“Why _are_ you bothering?”

“Good question. Get your bloody shirt off.”

Travis hissed in irritation, then he was peeling off the undershirt. Now that Blake was watching him more closely, he could see how Travis was compensating for his injuries. His prosthetic arm only had a limited range of movement, and he was clearly in pain, his movements stiff, his face waxy. He’d been so busy keeping watch on Travis, he’d somehow failed to see what was right in front of him.

“I think it’s contaminated,” he said after a few moments examining the wound. “How do you feel?”

Travis hesitated. “Dizzy,” he admitted. “And faint. Like I have a fever.”

“For how long?”

“An hour or so. I don’t know exactly.”

“And you didn’t think to mention it?”

“Admit a weakness? To _you_?”

“Because I’m in the ideal position to take advantage of it?”

“You’re the one with the rock!” There was a momentary silence, a sense like a gulf opening up, and then Travis made a sound, a kind of coughing gulp. It sounded to Blake, horribly like a strangled laugh. Then Travis spoke again, with faint dawning horror. “There _is_ something wrong with me.”

“Yes, it’s almost as if you’ve been drugged.” And when Travis swung around, he snapped, “Don’t look at me. I’m not exactly thrilled about this situation either. Hold still.”

Slowly, he began to clean out the wounds with antiseptic, while Travis flinching, the muscles in his back flexing and his skin prickling with goosebumps. He clung onto the back of the chair so tightly his knuckles had gone white, the tendons in his neck tightening every time Blake brought the cotton wool pad to his skin. He couldn’t seem to stop looking at Travis’s scars, and not just around his left shoulder, but elsewhere, and not all of them caused by Blake.

“Let’s say we could get to their weapon supplies,” he said, because it was better than listening to Travis’s strained breathing and thinking about the many ways the Federation had to make a man suffer. “Would anything still be usable after all this time?”

Travis brooded for a few moments. “It’s possible. It depends on what they were issued with. And whether there’s anything left. It’s a small facility. And it wasn’t a Federation base, so I doubt there was a strong security presence.”

“Unless they were trying to protect themselves against the Federation.”

“They’d have done better protecting themselves against those creatures.” He sucked air through his teeth sharply as Blake dabbed at the wound.

“Sorry,” he said automatically, and Travis turned his head and glared at him, irritated by the apology. Blake frowned back. “Force of habit.”

“You’ve got an excellent bedside manner, Blake.”

“Yes… Pity I’m your worst enemy, isn’t it?” Blake said, and Travis gave another coughing laugh which he quickly choked off. He leant forwards and pressed his forehead against the back of his hands.

“Bastard,” he hissed under his breath. Then: “We can look, but I doubt there’ll be anything left. You saw the mess hall. There was a mini-war conducted here. I can guess who won and it wasn’t the scientists.”

“You think they’re all dead then?”

“I’m certain of it. And I think our chances of getting out of here alive are about as good as theirs were.”

“Have a little faith, Travis.”

“Faith in what, exactly? You?” A shudder ran through him, making the muscles flex beneath his skin. “I don’t have faith in anything.”

* * *

Once he’d been bandaged up, having refused the proffered painkillers with a scowl, Travis set about dismantling one of the lightweight melamine chairs, using the strength in his prosthetic arm to twist and wrench the metal until it came apart from the base. Blake kept studying the plans, trying not to wince either at the noise or the thought of Travis with something that could be called a weapon. It was a vicious-looking thing when he was done, lightweight, but the end was a jagged twist of metal. Wielded with some force, it might make a surprisingly efficient weapon. Travis tested it with a couple of swings, then looked up, catching Blake’s eye as if he’d almost forgotten he was there. There was a trace of a mirthless smile playing on his lips.

“Ready?”

_I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready for this._

Dread pressing at his mind, Blake glanced down at the plans trying not to stiffen in alarm as Travis came closer. “Surely the famous Blake isn’t scared.”

“We don’t know what’s down there. And those air ducts...” He stabbed his finger at the plans. “They run partly down the outside of the building. If you’re not scared, Travis, then you ought to be.”

“So it isn’t me that you’re afraid of, then?”

“Should I be? We have a truce, remember.”

The mirthless smile spread, glittered in his eye. “How could I forget?”

 _Enough of this._ He wanted to be out of here. Back up on the surface. Back on the Liberator. To be as safe and secure as he was ever likely to be and amongst people he called friends, and not here with this man who under normal circumstances would have killed him as soon as look at him, probably after torturing him first. He’d had quite enough of torture.

“Let’s just get this over with,” Blake snapped.

* * *

He’d known from the outset it was going to be a tight squeeze. It took some time to get the panel unscrewed, giving up on the flimsy butter knife he was using and twisting the screws out by hand once they’d been loosened enough. The edges bit into the pads of his finger and thumb, but that was a discomfort that paled next to having Travis squatting beside him working away at the other two. And then they were levering the panel off, and peering into a pitch black sloping tunnel that looked too narrow for a child, let alone him. Like it would swallow him up. A flash of a memory, from after his capture, the machine they’d hooked him up to closing tight around him, darkness and pain.

“Well?” Travis stared at him, then he made a sound of contempt deep in his throat when Blake didn’t answer straight away. He snapped one of the flares so that it burst into light, sending shadows creeping across his face from below. “I’ll go first, shall I?”

He elbowed Blake out of the way, wedged the flare into his belt, and cast an impatient glance into the tunnel as if it was nothing, before clambering into the hole, feet-first, and wriggling inside.

Maybe there was something to be said for FSA training, after all, Blake thought, watching as Travis half-slid, half-wriggled downwards to the accompaniment of hollow bangs and the occasional clatter of the chair leg against the metal sides of the duct.

Blake flinched and leaned into the duct. “You’re making _too much noise!_ Put the chair leg inside your jacket.”

“ _Fuck_.” After a few more moments banging about, Travis looked up at him. “I can’t. I don’t have the room to do it.”

Blake swallowed back a grin and held out his hand. “Give it to me then. I can take care of it for you.” Travis scowled, looking furious. “Oh come on, Travis, you know you can trust me.”

“ _Fine._ ” He passed it up, and Blake took it, already unzipping his jacket, wrapping it around the chair leg. Travis glared at him. “I want it back.”

“Naturally.”

Jaw clenching so hard his cheeks had hollowed out, Travis shot him a look of pure hatred. “I want it back, Blake.”

“Of course.”

Travis made a faint sound of disgust, then began to work his way down the duct again, reaching the corner where its slope steepened. “Well?” Blake called down to him.

“There’s room,” Travis called back up, still sounding irritated. “It’s tight, but there’s just enough space to manoeuvre.”

No choice, then. Grimacing, he slipped the chair leg into the bag slung over his shoulder, and slid his feet into the hole. There was a sick sensation of the ground dropping away beneath him while the darkness swallowed him up, an echo of the nightmares he had every so often, ever since the deaths of Bran Foster and his people. Maybe even before that too; they felt like old dreams. Darkness, and the echoing screams of everyone who’d died following him, everyone who might die following him in the future.

He worked his way down, a little unnerved at how relieved he was at the grunts and muffled thumps from Travis beneath him, how it was proof that he wasn’t alone. Pressing his back against the duct, his feet against the opposite side, he inched himself down, blocking off the light from below. When the emergency lighting above went out, he was in almost total darkness.

They’d be on the outside of the building now, nothing but a thin sheet of metal separating him from the void beyond. His back was already starting to ache, the muscles in his arms shaking and his neck stiff and painful, the strap of the bag rubbing his skin raw. Only in his thirties and he was already getting too old for this.

 _Hardly surprising,_ he thought. _You always knew the lives of rebels were nasty, brutish and short._ Too many beatings, too little rest, and altogether too much torture.

After what seemed like an age Travis stopped completely, and something akin to panic flared in Blake’s heart. “Travis?” He twisted, but he could see nothing beneath him. “What is it? Why have you stopped?”

“We’re halfway.”

 _Is that all?_ His heart sank. He looked up, but could see nothing but darkness. After a long few moments, Travis began to move again. Blake waited, running his tongue around his dry mouth, trying to work up some saliva, and hoping it was just nerves and not dehydration setting in.

Keep moving, he thought, and still it took all his willpower before he could summon up the courage to press his arms against the inside of the duct again. They’d come halfway. They were almost there. He needed to–

A sound came from somewhere above him, a scrabbling sound that echoed through the duct. He froze, gaze snapping upwards.

“Travis?” he hissed. The other man hadn’t heard; he kept moving, the noises he was making horribly loud. “Travis, stop.”

“What is it?” Travis snapped upwards.

“Shut up and listen.”

For a moment, the silence was so deep Blake wasn’t altogether certain he hadn’t imagined it. He could all but sense Travis’s growing irritation, could imagine the man shaping his lips into a sneer, ready to spit something contemptuous up at him, when the scrabbling sound came again: the scrape of claws on metal. A chill sensation flooded through him. He stared upwards into the ink-black darkness above him, imagining one of those creatures inside the duct with them, hauling itself down towards them. Then the shriek came, muffled and tinny, and he realised it had to be on the outside of the duct. Outside, but close by.

Desperate suddenly for light, he pressed his back hard against the duct, and looked down, saw Travis’s upturned face, lit from below by the fizzing light of the flare. It was skull-like, blanched to the white of bone, with shadows pooling in both eye sockets, so it almost looked as though he had two eye-patches.

Something slammed into the duct almost directly by Blake’s face. He flinched, barely managed to hold back his cry of alarm, but didn’t manage to keep his purchase on the metal. He skidded downwards, friction searing through his sleeves, dropping at least a couple of feet before he managed to catch himself, heart racing, his throat so tight he could barely breathe.

If they’d heard him… Could they tear through metal? Oh god, he hoped not. He looked down and met Travis’s gaze, expecting contempt and finding only his own fear mirrored back.

From outside, there came a series of clatters and bangs. A trill of birdlike chirps. The metal shivered, denting inwards. Travis turned his head to stare at the metal by his head. Blake’s hand had slipped into the bag slung around his neck and tightened on the chair leg, not that he would have been able to do a damned thing with it.

Another series of screeches, more clattering, more claws. Several of them then, a whole bloody hoard, like the troops of monkeys that used to live on Earth centuries ago. So many the duct rattled around him, shook with the impact, and the deafening roar of their passing.

And then they were gone. He held himself still, eyes squeezed shut, muscles trembling with the strain of holding himself upright, and by the time silence had settled once more he’d lost track of how much time had passed. Blake exhaled shakily through his nose. Travis had pressed his face against his upper arm.

“They’ve gone,” Blake said, unable to suppress the tremor in his voice, and heard Travis mutter something under his breath.

* * *

The last part of the journey was a tense affair. It was a constant struggle fighting the urge to keep themselves from dropping the rest of the way as quickly as they could, and instead keeping their movements quiet as possible. Blake felt as if each minute he wasn’t moving made it twice as hard to carry on, so he resented every time Travis paused. And at last when they reached the panel to the sub-level floor he winced as Travis braced himself and kicked the panel in, knocking it out into the corridor with a deafening clatter of metal on metal. They waited for another few moments waiting for the screeches, but the silence echoed, and eventually Travis gripped the sides of the opening and slid out into the corridor, taking the light with him.

Blake let himself drop the last couple of yards. He found Travis waiting to haul him through, less to assist Blake and more so he could retrieve his precious chair leg.

The emergency lighting wasn’t working at all down here, the light fittings remaining resolutely dead. Which was, he supposed, grimly fitting. While Travis yanked the chair leg out of the bag, hefting it with the air of a man greeting an old friend, Blake held out his hand and Travis handed the flare to him.

“Which way to the weapons locker?” he demanded.

Blake pointed the way. Travis gave a grim nod, then strode away down the corridor.

Blake followed, keeping up with ease in a way he suspected irritated Travis no end. “How many of them would you say there were?” he asked.

“If we’re unarmed? Too many.”

They turned a corner and saw a panel set into the wall. “That’s it, I think,” Blake said. Travis picked up speed, shoving ahead of Blake, and yanked it open. A strange preternatural stillness came over him.

The damn thing was empty, of course. A line of charging clips that once would have held rifles hung empty, but even if the rifles had been in place, by the looks of the technology they’d all have been dead anyway. There were a couple of compartments for other weaponry, and Travis moved quickly, rifling through the drawers, confirming what they both already knew: everything was gone.

He slammed his fist into the wall in a sudden rage.

“ _Fuck!_ ”

He’d changed, Blake realised with creeping unease. This was not the same man he’d fought at the behest of Sinofar and Giroc, the duel which seemed like several lifetimes ago. That Travis had been all cold arrogance and icy anger, able to keep his rage well under control, and as predictable as a man like that could be predictable.

He was different now, more volatile. Blake had glimpsed it on Exbar. The flash of fire in his eye when Travis went to backhand him, the way he’d turned away when the crimos had struck Inga. The old Travis wouldn’t have turned his back, if he ever would have let it get to that point at all, which Blake doubted. The old Travis would have watched, implacable and without mercy, searching for signs of weakness, anything he could use. He was losing control, and the tighter he clung on, the more his grip would slip. Whatever had happened to him since he’d parted ways with the Federation, this was a man who might be capable of anything.

Slowly, Travis lifted his head and eyed Blake balefully as if he’d guessed something of what might be going through his head. His hair was dishevelled, giving him a wolfish air, the look of a man who was gradually losing control over his violent instincts. “What now, Blake?”

“We stick with the original plan,” Blake said, his tone soothing. “Let’s see if we can gain access to the lift shaft from here. We could be out in the fresh air before we know it.”

* * *

For once, they were in luck. Of a sort, anyway.

The lift was in ruins, the doors ripped open by what must have been another thermal grenade. The hatch in the ceiling was ajar, the same fungal growths twining in through the gap and casting a greenish pall on their upturned faces. Blake wedged the flare in his belt, trying not to get his hopes up. “Boost me up,” he said, and then when Travis scowled, “Unless you want to go first?”

Wordlessly, Travis clasped his hands together. Blake set his foot on the makeshift step, and knocked the hatch aside, skin crawling at the spongy feel of the fungal growths on his skin. He hauled himself onto the top of the lift, eyeing the shaft above. Metal scaffolding clung to naked rock, a ladder stretching upwards into darkness. So far, so good.

Travis called his name from below, and he held his hand out through the hatch, helping Travis up.

“I think this might be our way out.”

Travis didn’t look convinced. “What if there’s no way through at the top?”

“Then we’ll either have to figure a way to get through or else find another way out. Let’s worry about that problem when we get to it.” He made his way awkwardly across the fungus-covered roof of the lift to the ladder. “No time like the present, I suppose.”

“Are you really that eager for our truce to be over, Blake? You do know when it is I’m going to kill you, don’t you?”

“Yes, you have mentioned it once or twice.” He looked up, gripping the ladder, and was about to start the climb when Travis caught his arm.

“ _Wait_.”

“What is it?”

“There. Look, about ten yards up.” He pointed at the rock behind the metal scaffolding. Blake looked but he could see nothing but the deep pooling shadows. Nothing there, he thought, mistrust of Travis rising up in his throat, then he saw something move, a glimmer of green reflecting on pallid white flesh, just for a moment before it pulled back into the hollows of the rock. “It’s an ambush. They’ve been waiting for us.”

“They’re not stupid then. Just the one?”

“I doubt it.”

An arm reached out of the darkness, and curled around the edge of the scaffolding. He heard the _skritch_ of claws against metal, the sound unnervingly deliberate, as if it had been deliberately intending to get his attention. His foreboding grew. “Travis...”

“Back down. _Now_.”

It happened so fast. One moment they were scrambling towards the hatch, the next a shriek rang out from above and something was plunging towards him. Blake threw himself aside and hit the roof of the lift, hands stretched out to brace his fall.

The fungus broke apart, releasing a thick cloud of spores into the air. Startled, he inhaled, breathing a cloud of them into his lungs and almost immediately choking. Travis dropped through the hatch, coughing as though something were trapped in his throat that he needed to bring up.

The creature clawed at Blake’s legs, and he swiped at it with the only weapon he had to hand, the flare. It screeched, batting it out of his hand. He kicked out at it, then clawed towards the hatch and tumbled through, clumsy in his dizzied panic.

He landed hard on the bottom of the lift, saw it crawling batlike after him, leathery wings the colour of yellowed leather folded against its back. And then he was on his feet and running, following the receding light of Travis’s flare, breathless and dizzy.

_Something’s wrong._

It felt like there was something caught in his throat, his thoughts confused. Ahead of him, Travis took a sharp turn into one of the bedrooms, and Blake followed him, fighting the urge to slam the door behind him. He forced himself to close it carefully instead, and even the quiet click of the latch clicking into place sounded too loud.

For a moment they stood motionless. Then Travis bent over, his hand on his chest, trying to rub something loose. His breathing was hoarse, the sound scratchy and painful, the wheeze audible, and the sound was echoed in Blake’s own breathing, the feeling of something stuck in his chest, which he couldn’t quite shake loose.

Travis looked up, the glaring light making his pupil seem unnaturally large and dark, his lips parted. Blake stared at him, mesmerised, waves of hot and cold running over his skin as he wavered on his feet.

Abruptly Travis moved as if he’d suddenly remembered the light, dropping the flare on the floor and grabbing the covers to dump them on top of it.

“It can’t see the light,” Blake said, reaching out to grab his hands. “They’re blind.”

“Do you really want to risk it?”

Out in the corridor, something thumped against the door. They both looked up, and Blake knew the expression on Travis’s face, one of mingled fear and dread, was reflected on his own. It slid against the metal, scratching against the door, It knew they were there. Or suspected, at least, but…

“It can’t get in.” He breathed the words rather than spoke them aloud, a kind of prayer mantra of wishful thinking. _Travis was right. It doesn’t know how to open_ –

The handle began to turn.

He heard Travis exhale, the sound still rough and raspy, and something spiralled inside his head. As the door slid open, creaking on its hinges, Travis backed towards the built-in cupboard set into the wall, moving soundlessly as a cat.

Claws curled around the edge of the door.

Travis reached behind him, his eyes not moving from the doorway, and opened the cupboard. As the creature shoved the door open with a nudge from its flanks, Travis backed inside. Blake followed him into the dark, coffin-like interior of the cupboard, and pulled the door to as quietly as he could.

Then they were pressed together in the darkness, the confines of the space close and hot, muggy with the smell of sweat, his own and Travis’s.

Perspiration broke out on his brow. Their breathing sounded much too noisy in the confined space, but holding his breath made the scratchiness in the back of his throat worse. His heartbeat sped, a rapid pulse in his throat, and wedged in as they were it felt like he couldn’t get comfortable. Travis was all hard edges and angles, refusing, in the places where they couldn’t help but press together, to give way.

His thoughts were strange. Incoherent in a way he didn’t like. Waves of heat and ice cold streamed over him, his blood seeming to rush, then freeze in his veins, then rush again, a constant stuttering pulse. The itching sensation in his throat worsened, until he was fighting the urge to cough. And it was warm, too warm, making him sweat harder; and the end of the metal chair leg was digging into his thigh.

It felt, he thought, the idea coming unbidden and unwelcome and at the worst possible time, like it ought to be the start of a bad joke. There was nothing funny about it, not even remotely, but the urge to laugh struck him with the force of a thunderbolt, so intense it was painful. He bit his tongue hard, desperate to stop himself bursting into humourless laughter. It didn’t even seem like it was his, but something alien, a living thing in his chest clawing its way up into his throat. He let out a shuddering breath, a faint keening sound in his throat.

Travis clamped his hand over his mouth, a hiss of warning hot against his ear. The creature passed so close to the cupboard its shadow fell over both of them and it blocked the light from the flare, casting them both into total darkness. Blake closed his eyes, but the bloody chair leg was still jabbing against his thigh, and the only way he could stop himself from laughing was to grip Travis’s wrist, twist his hand around and bite down on the blade of his palm, shuddering out a breath while Travis stiffened, rigid in fury against him.

The creature screeched, was answered with a series of clicks and squeals, and then it whirled, and bounded out of the room.

Blake relaxed his jaw, breathing shakily. “Sorry,” he muttered into Travis’s palm. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

He was starting to get an idea, though. The spores clearly had some sort of psychotropic effect, and judging by the way Travis was leaning into him, he’d been affected too. And apparently, that joke was coming true after all, because he could distinctly feel the outline of Travis’s erection pressing against the back of his thigh.

Blake knew, in theory, that he probably ought to be more concerned about that.

There _was_ fear, massing somewhere at the edge of his thoughts, but it was a hazy thing, numbed by the effect of the spores and overshadowed by Blake’s own arousal. He was hard too. Urgently so.

When Travis’s hand tightened on his mouth, Blake parted his lips. Let his tongue flick against the hollow of Travis’s palm. It tasted of sweat.

 _Of all the bad ideas_ …

He could feel Travis’s shallow breaths hot against the back of his neck. As if as an afterthought, Travis moved his prosthetic hand to Blake’s waist, the limited range of movement allowing that at least. It lingered there a moment, not doing anything, then his grip tightened and he pulled Blake hard against him.

_And of all the people…_

But then perhaps it was better this way. How much worse would this situation have been if he’d been trapped here with one of his friends… Avon, for example. Or Jenna… Someone he’d have to look at every day for god knew how long. He didn’t owe Travis anything, except possibly a quick death.

Blake shifted, trying to find a position that wasn’t quite so… compromising. And when he reached down to grip his cock, to adjust himself only, or so he told himself, he kept gripping it, squeezing it through his trousers. Travis’s hand dropped from his mouth and slid down his wrist to grip the back of his hand. Grinding himself in circles, he tightened his fingers over Blake’s, a barely vocalised groan deep in his throat. Blake dropped his head back, sucking air between his clenched teeth. The sensation was maddening, and it still wasn’t enough. He wanted to knock Travis’s hands away, jerk his trousers down, wrap his hand around his cock and bring the humiliating business to an end, while Travis…

No, never mind Travis. Travis didn’t have a bloody thing to do with this. It was the spores, their effect on his mind. A man couldn’t be held responsible for the things he did when he was under the influence of psychotropic drugs.

There was a mouth at his throat. Beneath his ear where the skin was tender and responsive. Heat and teeth and the wet probe of a tongue, and it was sending shivers of pleasure rippling out over his goosebumped skin. He squeezed his eyes shut, bit his lower lip. Told himself in no uncertain terms that this wasn’t happening. It wasn’t real.

It fucking well felt real.

 _Fight it,_ he thought. All but screamed the command internally at himself, but his body wasn’t responding. He didn’t want to fight it.

Travis’s grip shifted. He pressed his weight against Blake’s back and pushed him forwards, one hand planted against the wall of the closet, the other jerking roughly at the fastening of Blake’s trousers. And that at least struck him as a step too far. He resisted, twisting around to face. Travis tightened his grip, trying to force him back around, but with the limited range of movement in his left arm they were evenly matched. For a few moments they were locked in a desperate struggle, and all in almost total silence. Half-fighting, half rutting against each other, they’d all but forgotten where they were and why they’d come to be hiding in a cupboard in the first place.

And then suddenly, deafeningly loud, the chair leg clattered against the metal floor.

There was a moment of pure silence. They froze, holding their breath.

For an instant, Blake thought they might actually have got away with it. At least until the first of the screeches echoed down the corridor.

“You fool,” he spat in Travis’s face.

Travis gripped his jaw, his fingers biting into Blake’s chin, his eye burning with rage. Then he kissed Blake, bruisingly hard and with more contempt than desire. He stooped and snatched up the chair leg. as the first of the creatures came skittering through the door, Travis stormed out to meet it.

Even in the dim light it was a brutal thing to witness. The crunch of bone and flesh, nightmarish shadows crawling across the walls, distorted by the light, and amongst them Travis moved with terrible, deadly grace, bringing the chair leg down, crunching the twisted edge into skulls, hacking at flesh, stamping down to shatter bones. The last of the creatures – Blake had lost count how many there had been: three, maybe four – fought with the savagery of a trapped animal, but Travis brought the chair leg down, pinning it in place, while he stamped, until it had gone still, its skull reduced to a reddened pulp.

Breathing hard, Travis stood over the corpses littered on the ground around him, wavering on his feet. He gave a breathless laugh, dropping his head back, and when he heard Blake behind him, he went still. He turned slowly, poised in a defensive stance, and he looked at Blake as if he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to fuck him or bash his skull in or both. His eyes were glazed, his lips parted, shining with saliva and blood-splatter, and it made him look wild, almost drunk on the slaughter.

As Blake came towards him, hands held out in as non-threatening a gesture as he could make it, Travis swung towards him, slipped a little in the blood.

“Let go of the chair leg,” Blake said, his voice far calmer than he felt. “It’s over.”

“At least we know they can die.”

Blake closed his hand around the chair leg, and let out a breath when Travis allowed him to ease it out of his hands. “You can’t kill all of them.”

“No?” Travis said shakily. “Watch me.” He shuddered, and wiped the back of his hand against his mouth, smearing blood across his face.

Without thinking, Blake wiped the smear with his sleeve. Travis shivered, then without warning the violence in him returned with all the force of a storm tide.

When they kissed, Blake could taste the blood on his lips. Travis’s fingers tightened in Blake’s curls, wrenching hard, but since Blake was doing the exact same thing to him, he supposed he couldn’t complain too much. Thankfully, they had retained just enough remnants of self-control to shut the door and wedge a chair beneath the handle before they tumbled onto the bed, tearing at clothes and flesh and hair.

It wasn’t so much sex as a kind of awkwardly intimate wrestling match, and one which Blake, even in this state, could see might well make things very tricky between them in the future. Each of them fought to get the upper hand on the other, Travis trying to force Blake around onto his stomach and pin him down, and Blake trying to do the exact same thing to him. There was hair pulling, and teeth on skin, and arms tightening around throats, until they unwillingly managed to negotiate a ceasefire and settled instead for a kind of sexual no-man’s land, which involved plenty of rutting against each other and hands on cocks in lieu of actual penetration. Even under the influence of the spores, neither of them had any intention of submitting to that, not from this particular partner.

It was something of a victory, perhaps, that he was the one on top at the moment Travis came, with Blake’s hand on his cock. He felt a moment of searing triumph as he watched Travis’s face at the moment of orgasm, how he pressed his head back against the pillow as he gave himself over to a single brief moment of pure vulnerability. Less of a victory was the expression that came over his face at that moment, how little joy there was in it, only a kind of pure despairing desolation.

Something gripped Blake’s heart and squeezed.

The victory was short-lived, because he was drawing close himself, and he told himself, promised himself, that when the orgasm hit him it would be disappointing. It had to be: Blake hadn’t gone this long without fucking someone, and when it finally came to it, for it to be _this_ man, for it not to be one of the worst sexual experiences in his life.

It would be miserable, he promised himself. A momentary stab of bleak, ephemeral pleasure, that would be replaced almost immediately by an overwhelming sense of shame, leaving him humiliated, unsatisfied and unfulfilled.

Instead, and rather inconveniently, it was glorious.


	3. Chapter Three

Afterwards, they moved into one of the other bedrooms, careful in case any of the creatures remained, and fucked again on an unmade bed, where the sheets were grimy, but at least weren’t splattered with blood.

They’d lit a fresh flare, which bathed the room with an unnatural light which prevented either of them from pretending this was something other than what it was. Not that either of them knew what the hell it was. The harsh sodium glare made Travis’s pale skin stand out against the darkness of his eyepatch, and brought out the scars on his chest and back, the line where his prosthetic arm began.

 _I did that,_ Blake thought, and marvelled.

“Seen enough?” Travis seemed weary, rather than angry or bitter. Like he just wanted to get it over with.

It was gentler this time in a way, less of a struggle for dominance. They still hated each other, there was no question of that, but they weren’t quite so rough now, and there was a growing familiarity with each other’s bodies. Travis no longer tensed up when Blake touched his scars, and Blake had grown used to the implicitly teasing threat in the brush of Travis’s hand against his throat. It was a bad idea, of course it was: there was no way it could be anything but, but there was a kind of hunger about it too, like it had been just as long for Travis as it had been for him.

How long had it been, he wondered afterwards, once they were both sated and the endorphin-fuelled rush was ebbing away. It left them both in a state of the purest relaxation, Blake sitting up against the headboard, with Travis’s head pillowed on his chest. It felt like drifting away on a soma haze.

There had been encounters during his brainwashed period on Earth, but they felt like moments in a barely remembered dream. He’d forgotten almost everything about the other participants, faces, names... His mind shied away from the memories of that time. The whole period felt like a violation, and the worst violation of all was the manner in which he’d been torn free of it without warning or mercy, dragged like a screaming newborn into a harsh and unforgiving world.

After that, the possibility of a sexual relationship – of any kind of relationship – always seemed just out of his reach. It was too much to ask anyone to accept that sort of life, although he’d considered it idly from time to time.

He thought of Inga, and the knot in his throat tightened. He glanced at Travis, assuming he was half-dozing until he saw a glimmer of light from under his eyelid.

“What did Servalan offer you in return for my death?”

Something twisted in Travis’s face, like a shaft of sunlight, hazy liquid gold, breaking through leaden storm clouds. It was a curiously beautiful sight. “Freedom,” Travis murmured.

“In the Federation the only truly free man is a dead one.”

Travis opened his eye and looked at him.

Blake nodded. “So that’s it. If you kill me, she’ll reward you by marking you down as dead. Assuming of course, she doesn’t take a more literal route and decide it might be safer to kill you for real.”

Travis’s expression hardened, the light dimming. So that was something he’d considered then, something he was afraid of, even if he was crossing his fingers and hoping otherwise. “I won’t give her the chance.”

Blake’s hand moved of its own accord to Travis’s sweat-dampened hair. It was a disconcerting feeling, how little control he seemed to have over his own body. It felt like he’d been dosed with too much soma, or as if there was someone else behind the controls. Travis looked conflicted too, watching Blake’s hand with a grimace as if he would have liked to knock it away.

“There might be another way. If you want to die, you don’t need Servalan’s help for that.”

“Fake my own death? She wouldn’t be stupid enough to believe it.”

“She might,” Blake said. “If she thought I’d been the one to kill you.”

Travis made a noise, a soft contented sound in the back of his threat. He caught Blake’s wrist loosely, his eye heavy-lidded. “You’ve tried, Blake. And yet you keep failing–”

“’Opting not to’, Travis, there’s a difference. And there’ll come a time soon when I will stop sparing you. Servalan knows that. And if the Liberator destroyed your ship, she’d have no choice but to believe it, because who’d believe the alternative?”

It was back, that golden light, creeping over his face. Blake watched it in fascination, but even though he was disconnected from his own thoughts it didn’t mean he’d quite forgotten everything, even if his memories were fractured and confused. He still remembered what had happened to his fellow rebels, the men and women who’d followed him, unarmed and unresisting, slaughtered on this man’s orders. His hand tightened in Travis’s hair, pulling it hard enough that Travis’s mouth parted in a hiss of pain. He looked up at Blake with open naked want, still clinging to his wrist.

“And in return?” he said.

“Stop hunting me.”

“Help with your revolution, you mean.”

“Travis...” Blake forced his grip to relax. “Stop and think for a moment. You’re not a stupid man and the Federation betrayed you. I can’t believe, even after everything you’ve done–” Something flickered in Travis’s eye, a dark glinting light. “Even you aren’t beyond redemption.”

“You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you?” Travis said softly. “How many more are there like me, you think? Who’ve done the things I’ve done?”

“Not many.”

“More than you realise. And what about the troopers who followed me without question because that was what they were trained to do? What will happen to them when you seize power?”

“I don’t want power.”

“No?”

“I’m doing this to bring down the Federation. That’s all.”

“So noble of you.” Travis tilted his head back, kissed the inside of Blake’s wrist, then his grip tightened. “No,” he snapped when Blake tried to pull away. “It’s your turn to listen to me. Bring down the Federation and you’ll create a power vacuum which will make a black hole look like water swirling down a plughole. The only person with the strength to step into that nest of vipers will be as vicious and self-serving as Servalan herself. Or perhaps you believe the Terran Federation can be run by a committee of people with hearts as soft as yours?” His face twisted bitterly. No sunlight now, no hope: it was gone, wiped from view. “You think I’ve killed a lot of people? Well, you’re right: I have. I don’t deny it. I don’t regret it–”

“I don’t believe you.”

“–But if you bring down the Federation, it will be a bloodbath. And you will be responsible for the deaths of millions throughout the galaxies. How many lives do you judge freedom to be worth, Blake?”

“So that’s a no then.”

Travis snorted. “I always knew you were ruthless,” he said, staring at Blake. “I just didn’t realise how ruthless.”

“The Federation are responsible for the slavery and deaths of millions _now_. You’re wrong, Travis.”

“I’m not, and you know it. In here.” He reached up and placed his hand against Blake’s chest, a proprietary gesture, a kind of claiming, just as Blake’s hand in his hair had been. The two of them touching each other, carelessly, easily, like they were lovers of long acquaintance rather than enemies with ties of hatred and murder binding them tight. It made the world feel off-kilter, tilted on its axis.

There was probably no one else in the universe who knew him better than this man, Blake realised. Even his friends back on the Liberator, even what few family members he still had left alive. The people who knew him then barely knew the man he was now, and the people who knew him now knew nothing about the man he’d been.

Blake had barely even remembered Inga or her father existed until he’d seen her on the visplay, but _Travis_ had remembered. He knew Blake utterly, inside and out, the man he’d once been, and the man he’d become. In many ways, he knew Blake better than Blake knew himself and the realisation filled him with a crushing weight of despair and yearning. Maybe that was the reason why Blake had never been able to bring himself to kill him.

“You’re lying to yourself because you can’t admit the price you’re willing to pay. And it is pointless, Blake, because you are going to lose.” This last was stated slowly, softly, in a tone which, if he hadn’t known Travis better than that, Blake might have taken for regret.

“No?”

Travis held his gaze a moment, biting his lower lip, then looked away. “No,” he said.

“Travis...”

“ _Never_. This... truce lasts until we’re off-planet, and then it’s over.”

* * *

Blake fell asleep. He hadn’t meant to, but exhaustion had been creeping up on him for a while, and he couldn’t really remember a time when it hadn’t been. He jerked awake in a sudden cold sweat of fear, remembering where he was and who he was with. The effects of the spores had mostly worn off, and it felt a little like returning to sobriety after a heavy night, but with no real hangover to speak of, only a little fuzziness at the edges of his thoughts. Just all the terrible decisions you’d made the night before waiting to be recalled with crystal-clarity.

His mouth was arid, his throat painful and scratchy. Thirst pressed urgently at him, and he thought of the running water, fungal threads twining through the filters, spores seeping into the water. His gut clenched.

Travis was awake, sitting on a chair with his booted foot resting against the door, the chair leg across his lap. He’d dressed again, the black trooper’s uniform an uncomfortable reminder of just how vulnerable he’d been. His own nakedness was another. Blake sat up and cast around for his clothes. There was semen drying on his belly and he couldn’t remember which of them it belonged to. Flushing, he scratched at it as he retrieved his shirt and pulled it on over his head, aware Travis had turned his head to watch him, his face expressionless. Had he been watching Blake as he slept?

“Any life out there?” Blake asked to cover his discomfort and irritation at his own carelessness.

“Not yet.”

“Well, that’s something.” He rubbed his face. “I’m losing track of time. How long have we been down here?”

“I can’t be certain. Perhaps eighteen hours. Give or take.”

Blake repressed a shiver. How long would Avon give it, he wondered, before he started to press the others to leave? How long did he have? They’d waited for him when he’d gone off after Gan’s death, but he’d left them a message then. For all his idiotic posturing which could very well have ended in disaster, they’d had reason to believe he was alive. But if he vanished without a trace with Travis after him and an pursuit ship in the vicinity too…

Travis was watching him intently. “That’s the trouble with criminals,” he said, lazy, cruel, “They can’t be trusted.”

 _I suppose you learned that from the crimos,_ Blake wanted to say, but instead he took a breath and knotted his fingers in his hair. For once he wasn’t tired. Just thirsty. Desperately thirsty. He thought of the water, those flecks of shining green. “When was the last time you slept?”

“Not since I left the pursuit ship.”

“Right.” He stood and stretched, rolling his shoulders, then nodded to the bed. “I’ll take over for a bit. You get some sleep.”

“Not necessary.”

“Even you can’t function on no sleep.”

Travis glanced up at him, mouth tight. “Would you have slept if you’d had a choice in the matter?”

 _If I’d known you wouldn’t bash my skull in,_ he thought, but even then he had to concede the answer was probably no. “I’m being pragmatic, Travis. We’ll have a better chance of survival if we’ve both managed to get some sleep.”

The other man hesitated, then grimaced, and rose up in a smooth movement, reluctantly handing over the chair leg. The end was black with caked blood. Blake sat down as Travis sank onto the bed, glaring at Blake as if he’d left the sheets warm and rumpled as a personal insult, then he lay down, hand over his eyes. Blake leaned back in the chair, tilting it on its back legs as he set his boots against the door, and sat for a while, waiting for Travis’s breathing to even out into the deep rhythm of sleep. When it didn’t happen, he glanced around and saw from the glimmer of light beneath Travis’s eyelid that he was still awake.

And maybe the effects of the spores hadn’t quite passed entirely, because he heard himself say, softly enough that he could hope Travis might not hear him speak, “For whatever it’s worth, Travis, I am sorry.”

The temperature seemed to plummet several degrees.

“Not for firing on you. You deserved that for what you did, but...”

“Go on.”

“I wish I’d killed you outright.”

The silence stretched out. Travis stared at him, then he gave a choked up laugh and rolled onto his back. “Well, that’s heart-warming, Blake,” he said at the ceiling. “I don’t think I’ve felt so appreciated since my court-martial. I’ll treasure this moment.”

“Go to sleep, Travis,” Blake murmured, and after a while, probably as much to Travis’s surprise as it was to Blake’s, he did.

* * *

They made the interminable journey up the air ducts again. At the top Blake hauled himself, tumbling out onto the floor in a clumsy sprawl, every muscle screaming in protest. They’d have to make it at least one more time, he thought, offering a hand to Travis without thinking, who scowled at it but took it anyway, letting Blake drag him out. The lights had stuttered on, so they lay on the metal flooring in the dim twilight gloom.

His mouth felt like it was full of cotton wool. Eighteen hours, Travis had said, but that had been god knew how many hours ago, and by now Blake had completely lost track. The spores had distorted his sense of time, stretching out each minute into an age, shrinking each hour into the space of a heartbeat.

In the rec room they sat on either side of a table, the flask of treated water and two glasses between them. That water was all he could think of, how it would be clear and sweet as meltwater when he swallowed it down, and judging by how he could hear Travis working his tongue around his mouth, it was all Travis could think of too. Their gazes met, Travis’s expression as grim as his own. There was only one thing he could cling to, and he kept clinging to it, as Travis poured it out, the water purifying tablets would neutralise any toxicological effects. They had to. Wasn’t that the point of them?

They picked up their cups at the same time, each staring down into the water. Travis’s lip curled with revulsion.

“Well...” Blake said. He could see Travis staring at him at the edge of his vision. He swirled the water in the cup and immediately wished he hadn’t. When he took his first sip, he tasted at once the chemical tang of the tablets, and underneath a bitter taint. He almost choked it back up, but his treacherous body wouldn’t let him, and it went the wrong way instead, making him splutter. While he was coughing, Travis knocked his cup back in one.

After the first sip seemed to have had no effect, Blake took another swallow. _It’s fine,_ he was thinking in relief, _it’s fine_. When he’d inhaled the spores the effects had been instantaneous, impossible to mistake, but now he didn’t feel any different. Either the tablets had worked or the spores had lost their potency. He was fine…

And then it hit. So slowly, he didn’t even recognise it at first. It bubbled up inside him, a deep and overwhelming sensation of pleasure that flooded up his spine and out along his ribs, pooled at his groin and in his chest. It unknotted every muscle, made his blood burn, made him shiver with a silvery ripple that spread out across his skin and along his veins. It felt like a pleasure machine and soma combined, and then magnified a thousandfold. Like sinking into a warm, welcoming bed, with loving arms reaching out to celebrate his coming home.

It felt like the top of his head was fizzing open with bliss. No worries, no cares, just ecstasy, and he slid back into his seat, loose-boned and limp, but clear-headed too. More clear-headed than he’d felt in his life, as though he could simply turn his attention inwards and see the network of neural pathways in his brain, all the memories denied to him, everything that had been stolen from him low-hanging fruit simply waiting for him to reach out and pick it, which was wonderful except for the part where he wasn’t quite sure if he had full control over his limbs, metaphorical or otherwise.

All he had to do was reach out, and it didn’t matter at all what he might find because nothing could hurt him now.

“ _Oh_ ,” he heard himself saying. “That’s...”

“Imagine,” Travis said dreamily, “what the Federation could do with this.”

“Mmm. Remind me to blast the site from orbit when I get back to the Liberator.”

“Remind me to stop you,” Travis said, and Blake was laughing then, his uncooperative body seeming to flail and overshoot his command to sit up.

He managed to reach the couch and collapsed, and he couldn’t be sure which of them made the move towards the other, only that it wasn’t like before, when his head had been mostly clear. Now it was as if the edges of their bodies weren’t clearly defined, like he couldn’t tell what was real and what was not, where he ended and Travis began. He remembered asking a question, but he couldn’t tell if he’d only thought it, or if he’d asked it aloud. There’d been an answer too, he thought, but whether it had been real or not he couldn’t say.

The most extreme of the effects wore off relatively quickly (and it probably would have happened even faster if they hadn’t both gone back for another cupful), but the tail end of the effects stretched on, and for a long while afterwards they lay sprawled on the couch, stretched out alongside each other and far too comfortable to move.

“It’s worse every time,” Blake said without any particular urgency. Nothing seemed to have any urgency any more. “I don’t think we have any choice. We need to get out of here.”

“Agreed.”

And even then he lost track of how much time passed before they’d regained enough control over their bodies to so much as sit up, let alone get back to preparing to leave.

Another chair ripped apart, another chair leg which felt a little too light in his hands. Unnervingly so, like he was moving in low gravity. The ache in his muscles had eased away, leaving him feeling unexpectedly strong and ready for anything. Even the prospect of another climb down the air ducts didn’t faze him, and he wasn’t concerned any more about what he’d find above ground either, what he’d do if the bracelet proved to be broken, or if the Liberator was long gone…

One thing at a time. It was oddly easy.

A flash of a memory he couldn’t be sure was real: Travis’s hand on his chest, his mouth at Blake’s ear, telling him things about the man he used to be, details he hadn’t been able to remember for himself, or not consciously at least.

Maybe he was wrong and he had remembered: the memory could have been invented, or Travis had fed him nothing but lies, but it felt real enough. It all rang true, chiming with some distant chord inside himself.

Travis looked up and caught him staring. “What?”

Blake shook his head wearily. “Nothing,” he said. Then: “Did you–” He hesitated, the thought trailing off. “I’m still not in my right mind.”

Travis closed his eye, leaning against the wall for a moment in exhaustion. “No,” he admitted. “Nor me.”

Blake pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. A thought flashed through his mind, and he clung to it a little too eagerly: maybe they should wait, just a little bit longer. Take a little more time to prepare to give themselves the best chance.

There was shelter of a sort here, even if the safety it offered could only ever be illusory. But at least down here there was no more uncertainty over the motives of his allies: he already knew this man had every reason to want him dead and the drugs didn’t change that fact, they just obscured it. Aboveground was the Federation, rebellion, being hunted. Never leading a normal life ever again.

He shook his head to clear it.

“Let’s go.”

* * *

It was hell.

He’d thought he was back in his right mind, but climbing the lift shaft proved otherwise. Through some trick of vertigo or perspective, the walls of the shaft seemed to tighten inwards as they climbed as quietly as they could. They’d muffled their boots with strips of cloth, and still it felt like they were making too much noise, that each muffled thud would reverberate through the rock and bring the creatures running.

Strung out and boneless, and struggling to fight the fear that if they didn’t get out now, they’d never get out, his mind was playing tricks on him, and it felt like the ladder was moving downwards with each rung he climbed, that they could have kept climbing for ever and never getting any closer to the surface. Once that fear had lodged itself in his head he couldn’t get it out again, proof, surely, as if he needed any, that he wasn’t in his right mind.

When they passed the place where the creature had been hiding, they slowed, staring into the black depths of a tunnel that stretched away into the rock. Travis held out the flare, letting the light play over the opening, the shadows swooping and dipping as he searched for any sign of movement.

Nothing there. After a few minutes, they kept climbing.

Having the tunnel below them made it harder. Blake had to fight the urge to keep looking back, and it wasn’t just him: Travis kept slowing and glancing down too, and his progress was already slow due to his malfunctioning arm.

 _I should have gone first,_ Blake thought. He didn’t much like his chances if Travis lost his grip on the rungs, and his own hands were slippery with sweat. If either of them fell now, he was probably dead.

At the top of the lift shaft, there was a narrow ledge by the doors, with barely enough room on which to perch.

And of course they couldn’t get it open. The doors were sealed fast, the locking mechanism dead, probably beyond even Vila’s skills, and certainly beyond Blake’s and Travis’s. Someone had shattered the lock, driven something into the plastic plate and torn at the wires in a desperate attempt to trigger the manual door lock. Very likely the same person who’d left what might have been their handprint on the metal doors, a smear of long-dried flaking blood.

They stared at it, not quite able to make sense of what they were seeing, until Travis snarled and wedged the twisted point of the chair leg into the sliver of a gap. Precariously balanced as he was, he threw all his weight against it, and Blake joined him, pushing while Travis pulled breathing hard, muscles straining, panting in desperation and helpless thwarted rage, until the makeshift crowbar slipped free and almost sent them both tumbling down the shaft.

Travis tried again, the sound of metal on metal ringing out, but he barely made so much as scratch in the doors, and he would have gone tumbling down the shaft if Blake hadn’t grabbed the back of his uniform.

“We’re not getting through this way,” he heard himself saying. His voice was surprisingly calm, far calmer than he felt.

Travis growled in frustration, looking like he wanted to slam the chair leg into the door again, then abruptly he sagged, wiping his face on his sleeve. “No. So… what now?”

“I’m not going back.”

Travis nodded. “For once,” he said grimly, “we’re in total agreement.”

“So there’s only one thing we can do,” Blake said, relief lightening his voice. He hadn’t really expected Travis to agree so readily. “We go on. That tunnel must lead somewhere. Suppose we follow it?”

Their gazes met in a brief rueful acknowledgement, then they started down the ladder again, and clambered into the tunnel.

They moved as silently as they could, but the echoes were strange, making it seem as though something was behind them. Gradually, Blake realised with a growing sense of dread that the passageway was sloping downward, and the light of the flare was dimming. He could hear them too, a constant noise like the chittering of bats.

Passageways led off the main tunnel, and he kept thinking he saw shadows flickering at the edge of his vision, shapes darting into nearby tunnels. An ammonia reek was strengthening by the minute, powerful enough to make their eyes sting, and the sound of water grew louder, until they emerged from the mouth of the tunnel onto a plateau that bordered a vast cavern, so huge the far distant walls and the ground were swallowed up by darkness, the dim light of the flare barely enough to chase away the massing shadows.

Travis gripped his arm and indicated the roof above them with a jut of his chin. He looked as waxy and nauseous as Blake felt. Unwillingly, he looked up.

The ceiling was alive. Creatures, thousands of them, swarming around stalactites and rocky outcroppings in a constant seethe of writhing motion. They were smaller than the adult creatures he’d seen, but seemed every bit as vicious. They screeched and snarled and snapped at each other, chattering and squabbling in a rage, Occasionally one would slip, its wings snapping out, and it would haul itself back up.

The flare went out, plunging them both into absolute darkness.

Beside him Travis inhaled, breathed out the words, slow and barely audible, “Give me a flare.”

“No,” Blake whispered back.

Travis’s grip on his arm tightened. “Don’t be stupid. We can’t do anything in the dark.”

“I know… I’ll do it.” He thought of the noise it’d make, whether the crack of the breaking casing would be enough to alert the creatures to their presence. He fumbled blindly through the pack, closed his hand around a flare, felt it snag on the lining as he pulled it out, almost jerking it out of his hands. As he straightened up, his heart pounding, Travis caught the other end.

“Together,” he said, and then, leaning close, his breath hot against Blake’s ear, he added, “Don’t read anything into this. I want the light.”

It was almost a relief hearing that, even if he wasn’t sure he believed it. Normal service of a kind resumed.

He counted under his breath and they snapped the flare open. The sound was horrifically loud, like the breaking of a bone. The light burned bright and cold, blinding them both after so long in darkness and semi-darkness. They waited, and when the bright stars on his vision receded and nothing had happened, he exchanged a look of relief with Travis.

We’re all right, he thought.

And then the first of the creatures hauled itself over the ledge. It moved silently, with barely a scuff against the rock.

It was the first time he’d had the chance to see one close up and in light that was almost as clear and bright as daylight. His first instinct was to freeze, but it was coming at him; it knew he was there, and there are more coming up behind it. He stumbled back and reacted on instinct, kicking out at it. His boot caught it in the centre of its chest, sending it tumbling out over the edge, and as it fell, it _shrieked_.

The sound was echoed at once, a thousand times over. Piercing, shrill and agonising, like a Federation torture machine drilling into his skull, and there was nothing he could do but cover his ears, screaming to drown out the noise. Travis was doing the same, and somewhere along the line one of them had dropped the flare.

From there, things went from bad to worse.

He’d remember it in the weeks to come as a series of nightmare images. They swarmed, in a peristaltic rippling across the ceiling. Filled the air like angry wasps, but with significantly more teeth. One landed on his back, tangling its claws in his hair. It was about the size of a angry cat, and just as strong, twisting and wrenching in his grip when he dragged it off him, the sting of his claws registering with a dull throbbing fuzz in his head.

They poured over Travis in waves, and he used the chair leg to hack at them, driving the point into flesh and twisting, Travis tore himself free, backing towards the edge of the precipice, swinging the chair legs like clubs. Stones skittered out from beneath their feet.

Beneath all was darkness, but they could hear running water.

Travis regarded the advancing creatures with a grim expression, then he kicked the dropped flare out over the edge of the plateau. It plunged downwards, illuminating the water, black as ink beneath then, and a thousand scrawny, maggot-white bodies surging across the rock to the cliff. Then it hit the water and went out, extinguished, leaving them again in total darkness.

They jumped.

* * *

The water was freezing. Blake had been expecting to hit rock, maybe break a leg, if not his neck, but instead there was just the grip of the icy water, and then the current had caught hold of him. He came up, coughing, felt himself collide with another body in the water.

“Tra–” he started to say, then he whacked his head against a rock, and had to fight to stop himself from passing out.

The current dragged them onwards, through squeezes so tight he would have sworn they’d get trapped and drown, through chambers which glimmered with bioluminescent light, the rushing water as eager to get out into the fresh air as he was.

Then there was light ahead of them – real light – and he was sure it had to be a trick, that they’d crawl through the last opening and find themselves in a chamber filled with the bioluminescent fungus, and instead he was hauling himself out into blinding sunlight. The rock scraped his hip, but he was barely even aware of the pain, gasping as he held his head above the surging water. The droplets scattered in the sunlight, catching the light, and it was the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. He dragged himself free, and tumbled out, rolling end over end down the stepped waterfall, his shoulder blades hitting the rocks first. For a moment he couldn’t breathe, the water plunging over his head until he twisted it away and coughed, raising himself onto his elbows, half-laughing, half-crying. Too weak to roll out of the way as Travis came falling over the edge of the waterfall and landed on top of him. It didn’t matter: the sunlight was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. They were out.

They were free.

Epilogue

A surge of air bubbles bursting up around him. Screaming in his lungs, the urgent need to breathe. He thrashes and fights against the knee wedged between his shoulder blades and the fingers wrenching at his hair. But Travis is almost as weak as he is, and with the use of only one arm he’s at a disadvantage. Blake bucks, and manages to twist to one side almost enough to dislodge him, and in the moment Travis is off his guard, Blake’s hand closes on a rock.

He swings it up, slamming it around to crunch into Travis’s skull. The impact is weak but it buys him enough time to haul himself out from underneath Travis, gasping for air as he breaks the surface of the water.

He throws himself onto his back, kicking out blindly. His boot connects with Travis’s midriff, knocking the air from his lungs.

Blake scrambles forwards, throwing himself forwards, but the stones are slippery underfoot, and he slips, banging his knee against a rock in a sudden white heat of pain.

Travis is coming up behind him again.

Blake drives his elbow back into his face with a crunch, and then the arm’s back around his throat. Travis is half-laughing, breathless, maddened.

“For what it’s worth, Blake,” he hisses, his voice tight with bloodlust and rage, “I’m _sorry._ ”

“You will be.”

The voice seems to come from nowhere.

The grip around his throat snakes tighter as Avon steps out from the trees, blaster held at the ready, and just like the sky he doesn’t seem real, but entirely illusory.

“Let him go, Travis,” Avon says.

Travis gripped the edge of Blake’s jaw. “I will kill him, Avon,” he says. “Put the weapon down, or I’ll break his neck.”

Avon’s mirthless smile is real enough. “Yes, and then mine soon after, no doubt. I think, on balance, I’ll keep the gun.”

Travis stills, then he growls in frustrated defeat, and shoves Blake forwards.

Blake thrashes out of the water, slipping in the mud. “What are you doing here, Avon?”

“I’m as surprised as you are, believe me.”

“I never doubted you for a moment,” Blake says.

Behind him, still crouched in the stream, Travis snorts.

Avon brings the gun to bear. Blake moves almost an instant too slowly catching his arm and pressing at down, shivering at the resistance in Avon’s arm. Shivering even harder at the look of irritation Avon shoots him.

“We have a truce,” Blake says, as if that explains everything.

“It certainly looked like it when you were fighting for your life.” Avon gestures to a bag on the ground. “There are medical supplies and water in there.”

Blake bends to rifle through the bag. “How did you find me?”

“Orac analysed the layout of the cave system and suggested the most likely places where you’d come out. Assuming you did come out. Vila and Cally are checking the other potential exits.”

“And my ship?” Travis demands.

Avon’s smile widens. “Destroyed.”

Blake pulls out a bottle of water, uncaps it and takes a long swallow, gulping it down too quickly. His stomach convulses with a clenching spasm, and he retches, bending double, bringing up what’s left in his stomach, along with a trail of bile. He coughs, spits, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand then straightens up, ignoring Avon’s expression of distaste.

“Travis,” he says, and caps the bottle and throws it to him, while Avon stares, like he’s not quite certain if Blake hasn’t lost his mind. Travis catches it and glares balefully at him.

“You should have let him kill me, Blake.”

“He’s right.”

“Yes, thank you, Avon.” Blake squats and rifles through the bag again with clumsy fingers, taking stock of the emergency supplies Avon brought with him. Nothing they can’t spare. “What we spoke about, Travis... The offer’s still there. On the table.”

“No.”

“Well, if you change your mind, I’m sure you’ll find a way to contact me.” His mouth twists with a sudden surge of emotion that he can’t quite pinpoint. “You managed it before.”

“It’ll never happen, Blake.”

“No,” he says, suddenly desperately weary, and throws the bag forwards onto the muddy bank. “No, I don’t think it will. More’s the pity. We’ll contact Servalan, let her know you’re here.”

“I suppose you expect me to be grateful.”

“It’s the least I can do. We have a truce, remember?”

Avon opens his mouth to retort then he catches himself, his eyes narrowing as he takes in Blake’s dishevelled state. _Does he suspect,_ Blake wonders, then: _D_ _oes it matter?_

He feels giddy again, like nothing can touch him, and maybe the effects of the spores aren’t quite out of his system. There will be consequences in the days to come, and he’s exhausted, but it’s the good sort of exhaustion, the ache that comes after a long day’s hard work. Like he’ll be able to sink into his bed and sleep for a week and barely dream, and when he wakes he might actually have half a chance of feeling rested.

He might even have an answer to Travis’s question: how many lives he judges freedom to be worth.

When he first decided to target Control it seemed like a simple decision, the culmination of everything he’d been building towards, and Gan’s death was the spur to keep going, no matter the price. Since then he’s barely had the chance to stop and think about anything, let alone what Gan might have had to say about the ever-shifting objectives, the growing collateral damage.

 _It’s worth it_ , he thinks. _It has to be._

He activates the bracelet. “This is Blake. Bring us up.”


End file.
